FEEL: Quantifying Heterogeneity in Physiological Signals for Generalizable Emotion Recognition

Pragya Singh, Ankush Gupta, Somay Jalan, Mohan Kumar, Pushpendra Singh

Keywords: Emotion Recognition, Physiological Data, Benchmarking, Time-series, Data-centric AI, Machine Learning, Affective Computing, Multi-Dataset Analysis

TL;DR: We introduce FEEL, a benchmarking study evaluating 19 emotion datasets based on physiological signals, uncovering key insights into their generalizability and cross-dataset transferability.

Abstract:

Emotion recognition from physiological signals has substantial potential for applications in mental health and emotion-aware systems. However, the lack of standardized, large-scale evaluations across heterogeneous datasets limits progress and model generalization. We introduce FEEL (Framework for Emotion Evaluation), the first large-scale benchmarking study of emotion recognition using
electrodermal activity (EDA) and photoplethysmography (PPG) signals across 19 publicly available datasets. We evaluate 16 architectures spanning traditional machine learning, deep learning, and self-supervised pretraining approaches, structured into four representative modeling paradigms. Our study includes both within-dataset and cross-dataset evaluations, analyzing generalization across variations in experimental settings, device types, and labeling strategies. Our results showed that fine-tuned contrastive signal-language pretraining (CLSP) models (71/114) achieve the highest F1 across arousal and valence classification tasks, while simpler models like Random Forests, LDA, and MLP remain competitive (36/114). Models leveraging handcrafted features (107/114) consistently outperform those trained on raw signal segments, underscoring the value of domain knowledge in low-resource, noisy settings. Further cross-dataset analyses reveal that models trained on real-life setting data generalize well to lab (F1 = 0.79) and constraint-based settings (F1 = 0.78). Similarly, models trained on expert-annotated data transfer effectively to stimulus-labeled (F1 = 0.72) and self-reported datasets (F1 = 0.76). Moreover, models trained on lab-based devices also demonstrated high transferability to both custom wearable devices (F1 = 0.81) and the Empatica E4 (F1 = 0.73), underscoring the influence of heterogeneity. Overall, FEEL provides a unified framework for benchmarking physiological emotion recognition, delivering insights to guide the development of generalizable emotion-aware technologies. Code implementation
is available at https://github.com/alchemy18/FEEL. More information about FEEL can be found on our website https://alchemy18.github.io/FEEL_Benchmark/.

Code URL: https://github.com/alchemy18/FEEL

Primary Area: Evaluation (e.g., data collection methodology, data processing methodology, data analysis methodology, meta studies on data sources, extracting signals from data, replicability of data collection and data analysis and validity of metrics, validity of data collection experiments, human-in-the-loop for data collection, human-in-the-loop for data evaluation)

Submission Number: 1678